World on track for warm­ing of 2.7 Cel­sius by 2100, ex­ceed­ing UN goal

Earth is on track for av­er­age warm­ing of 2.7 de­grees Cel­sius by 2100, out­strip­ping the U.N. tar­get, said an anal­y­sis Thurs­day of coun­try pledges for curb­ing cli­mate-al­ter­ing green­house gas emis­sions.

While ex­ceed­ing the U.N. goal of lim­it­ing over­all warm­ing to 2 de­grees Cel­sius over pre-In­dus­trial Revo­lu­tion lev­els, the num­ber was an im­prove­ment on the 3.1 de­grees Cel­sius forecast is­sued in Septem­ber by Cli­mate Ac­tion Tracker (CAT), a tool de­vel­oped by a quar­tet of re­search bod­ies.

Thurs­day was the in­for­mal dead­line for coun­tries to sub­mit emis­sions pledges, known as In­tended Na­tion­ally De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tions or INDCs, which will form the back­bone of a uni- ver­sal cli­mate res­cue pact to be inked in Paris in De­cem­ber.

Some 140 coun­tries rep­re­sent­ing nearly 80 per­cent of global emis­sions have sub­mit­ted their plans so far, in­clud­ing ma­jor pol­luters China, the United States and the 28-mem­ber Euro­pean Union.

“The INDCs still pro­duce ... global warm­ing well above the 2 (de­grees Cel­sius) limit set by the global com­mu­nity,” said a CAT state­ment.

“This re­flects the less than suf­fi­cient cli­mate tar­gets sub­mit­ted by many gov­ern­ments,” though still a “sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment” of 0.4 de­grees Cel­sius from the last es­ti­mate.

The latest forecast in­cludes es­ti­mated num­bers for In­dia, the world’s fourth-largest green- house gas pol­luter — ex­trap­o­lated from public state­ments as the coun­try has not yet filed a for­mal con­tri­bu­tion.

To get on the path to 2 de­grees Cel­sius, an­nual green­house gas emis­sions would have to be 11-13 bil­lion tonnes lower in 2025 than pledged, said the CAT, and 15-17 bil­lion tonnes lower in 2030.

Based on pledges to date, emis­sions would be 52-54 bil­lion tonnes of CO2 equiv­a­lent ( GtCO2e) in 2025 and 53- 55 (GtCO2e) in 2030 — more than to­day’s es­ti­mated 48 GtCO2e per year.

It was “not very likely” that sub­mis­sions by coun­tries which have not yet filed their pledges would get us to 2 de­gree Cel­sius, Bill Hare of Cli­mate An­a­lyt­ics, a CAT con­trib­u­tor, told AFP.